Category Archives: Hip-Hop

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of their GRAMMY Award winning song, “Tha Crossroads,” Bone Thugs-N-Harmony are headed across the country for a series of live concerts and meet-and-greet events—including upcoming performances at the PlayStation Theater in Times Square, Manhattan on Feb. 24 and The Emporium in Patchogue, Long Island on Feb. 25.

Bone Thugs-N-Harmony formed in 1991, but didn’t hit it big until 1993, when “the Godfather of West Coast gangsta rap” and N.W.A. co-founder Eric “Eazy-E” Wright signed five rappers from Cleveland, Ohio—”Krayzie,””Layzie,” “Bizzy,” “Wish” and “Flesh”—to his label, Ruthless Records.

According to Stanley Howse, a.k.a. Flesh-n-Bone, “Crossroads” was originally written in dedication of Wallace “Wally” Laird III—a departed friend of the group—but after Wright died, in March 1995, they decided to go back and re-record “Tha Crossroads” for their second studio album E. 1999 Eternal.

“The record was pushed back around the time Eazy-E started to fall sick,” Howse said. “So, right now, there are about three or four different versions out there.”

Mississippi-born rapper/producer David Banner is on fire right now, and it has got us here at AWM pumped for his forthcoming studio album, The God Box, available May 19, from A Banner Vision.

Last year, Banner gave listeners an exclusive sneak peek at his creative process, with the release of his “Before The Box” mixtape. It’s an extremely satisfying glimpse at Banner’s creative process and shows the significant progress he made to shape a different kind of sound than we are used to hearing from the artist who brought us The Greatest Story Ever Told.

Although Banner’s seventh full-length studio album was originally expected to be released in 2016, delays in the production process led him to hold back the date until May 2017.

Brought up in discussions this past week, we phased ourselves with the question: If you were stuck on a deserted island, what would be the one album you would take with you?

Easier asked than answered was the revelation found by AWM, but after much thought, four brave writers have voiced their opinions on the one album they would want to have with them if they were deserted on an island.

The Rockaway Riot Squad was created in the early 2000’s, when four up-and-coming young rappers from the same neighborhood in Far Rockaway— Bynoe, Chinx Drugz, Cau2G$ and Stack Bundles — joined forces to create a hip-hop “supergroup.”

Tragically, in May 2015, Chinx was unexpectedly shot and killed on Queens Boulevard in Ridgewood. He never made it to see the success of his debut album, Welcome To JFK, which debuted at No. 2 on Billboard.com’s Top R&B/Hip-Hop album charts.

In an interview with Salute Magazine, last year, the slain rapper’s Executive Producer/Manager Douglas “Biggs” Ellison indicated that Chinx left behind several unreleased demos, which were used to construct the rapper’s second posthumous release, aptly named Legends Never Die.

So, on the first anniversary of the slain rapper’s death, Ellison and 4 Kings Management honored his memory by announcing the release of his sophomore album.

Hip-hop duo Rae Sremmurd have been keeping busy, following the success of their 2015 debut album SremmLife—which premiered at no. 1 on Billboard’s Top Hip-Hop and Rap charts.

Last December, Mississippi natives Swae Lee and Slim Jimmi went on the air with radio host Tim Westwood to announce plans for their follow-up SremmLife 2, which they were hoping to release February 2016.

Far Rockaway rap artist Donald Bradley, a.k.a. “Porche Boxx,” feels his community always gets a bad rap. That’s why he hopes to spread a more positive message to the easternmost part of the peninsula, with his upbeat bars and rhymes.

Bradley grew up in a difficult situation. Never knowing his father, he was raised by his mother, who inspired him to write. Outside of school, Bradley spent a lot of his time at the Ocean Bay Action Center.

“We would play ball to stay out of trouble,” he recalled.

The Wave recently met up with the upand coming rapper, Porche Boxx, at the Queens Public Library on Mott Avenue in Far Rockaway, to talk about his music, community and his love of basketball.

Flashback to the early 2000’s, when four up-and-coming rappers from the same community in Far Rockaway, Queens, joined forces as the Hip-Hop “supergroup,” Tha Riot Squad. Rappers Bynoe, Chinx Drugz, Cau2G$ and Stack Bundles grew up in the same neighborhood, attended the same schools and knew a lot of the same people.

However, in 2007, Stack Bundles was shot and killed by an unknown assailant outside of his apartment building. To this day, investigators have not found any leads on the perpetrator. The following year, when Chinx was released from prison after serving a three-year sentence, members of the Rockaway Riot Squad tried to pick up where they left off.

Sadly, the 31-year-old recording artist also met with an untimely death on May 17, 2015, when he was shot and killed at the wheel of his Porsche Panamera in Briarwood, Queens – just three months before the release of his debut album, Welcome to JFK.

Now, more than a year later, both of the surviving members of the Rockaway Riot Squad will be reuniting on a new track, entitled “All Good,” dedicated to the memory of their fallen comrades.

Riot Squad Co-Founder Cau2G$ has worked with such big name artists as Nicki Minaj, Tony Yayo, Kanye West, Joe Budden, and Cory Gunz, and has been featured on several of the Riot Squad’s mixtapes. AMW recently caught up with Cau2G$, outside of his childhood home on Mott Avenue, to talk about new music, living in Far Rockaway and the current trend of violence in Hip-Hop.

Although 2015 didn’t turn out exactly as director Robert Zemeckis predicted in his hit film Back to the Future Part II, it was still quite an exciting year.

So, we haven’t exactly figured out how to manufacture flying cars or self-adjusting clothing, but we did celebrate 50 years of the Grateful Dead; we witnessed “The Killer” Jerry Lee Lewis embark on his final U.K. Tour; we watched the Foo Fighters perform despite frontman Dave Grohl’s broken leg; we scoffed as presidential candidate Donald Trump fought with artists such as Neil Young, Method Man, and R.E.M.; and laughed at the many different parodies of Drake’s “Hotline Bling” music video.

But, like every year, 2015 had both its “ups” and its “downs.”

Following the Nov. 13 terrorist attack on a Paris nightclub, which claimed the lives of 89 victims attending an Eagles of Death Metal concert, people all over the world came together in a show of solidarity for the victims and their families.